The Result of University Cost-Cutting Measures . . .

the Plausible Deniability Blog takes up where the PostModernVillage blog left off. While you'll see many of the same names here, PDB allows its writers and editors a space away from financial strum und drang that torpedoed the PMV blog.

Sunday, December 13, 2015

The most obvious
reason should be addressed first: the Tea Party has the backing of a
couple of billionaires. This helps it survive, but as Occupy itself
demonstrated, a lot can be accomplished with very little. The money
is part of why the Tea Party still exists, but it it's far from the
only reason.

2. Occupy has no
electoral strategy. The Tea Party does.

It's as if no one
from Occupy paid attention in high school civics class. The
government in the US is not a top-down affair, and though Tea Party
people complain endlessly that it is, they act very differently. We
actually have a mixed system of local and federal control, a system
in which the individual parts interact.

The Tea Party has
what is sometimes called a “ground game.” This involves getting
voters to vote for you. It involves meeting people. It involves
fielding candidates. It involves knocking on doors. Occupy people are
good at organizing rallies, but most voters tend to view that sort of
thing as silly at best and threatening at worst. Occupy people are
good at snarky Facebook memes. Tea Party people are good at winning.

Electoral strategy
involves understanding that the county commission or the city council
has more impact on the everyday lives of people than what happens in
Washington, DC. Local government negotiates tax incentives for
businesses, fills potholes, and makes sure the housing authority is
doing its job. This is the level at which the tone of
government is set. The utter absence of Occupy at this level means
that the Tea Part message is the only one that gets heard. The voices
of local health coalitions, food banks, and nonprofit service
agencies sound like the “special interests” the Tea Party loves
to vilify when there's no countervailing voice articulating why these
things are important and deserve government backing.

State legislatures
are important because, among other things, they determine federal
congressional districts. We complain when these districts are
gerrymandered, but, like it or not, this is the way things work.
By failing to pay any attention to state legislatures, Occupy assured
that Tea Party types would draw congressional districts. This made
certain that Tea Party candidates would always win, as congressional
districts would be “safe” for them for the foreseeable future.

As we have seen in
Kansas, state and local officials also have tremendous power over
voting regulations, and Occupy's seeming blindness to state and local
government has allowed voter ID laws to keep people who agree with
the Occupy message away from the polls.

This is sad because
state and local offices are relatively cheap and easy to win. Since
Occupy is great at organizing via social media, it should have
representatives all over the place, but it does not.

3. Occupy decided
to be about making a scene and not about making change.

As much as we'd love
to think so, elections are not decided by Facebook “likes” or
retweets. They're not won by high-quality bongo playing in Zuccotti
Park. And while Occupy probably made the candidacies of Bernie
Sanders and Elizabeth Warren possible, it did nothing to make Occupy
a political force across the nation.

We are rightfully
pissed off at Wall Street, but investment bankers are not, on the
whole, capable of being shamed. Going to the physical location of the
problem made for great theater, but it made for terrible politics.
Contrary to what some in the Occupy movement seem to think, there are
places in the country that are not Manhattan and not Cupertino. Even
if Occupy had influenced politics in New York (it didn't much as
Chuck Schumer is still office), that would have captured only a few
congressional districts, giving Occupy only a smattering of votes
among 435.

What can be done
about it.

Had Occupy, instead,
focused on winning over voters in Butte, Montana, it might have
produced a senator or two, and a senator can filibuster. Had
Occupiers stayed awake in civics, they would have understood this and
focused a bit more deeply on the so-called “red” states. After
all, our system of government actually favors the states, not the
population on the whole. The fact that the majority of people agree
with Occupy on policy makes little difference politically: he who
controls Congress does matter.

Where Occupy got the
idea that it could foment real change by focusing on New York City
I'll never know—perhaps it's just an assumption that flyover states
are inherently conservative and therefore not worth the effort. And
while it's true there were small, local bands of Occupy activists all
over the place, the bulk of Occupy energy went into making its point
to people who simply don't care and structurally don't have to.

Instead, Occupy
should have focused on crafting its message to appeal to the people
who are actually being hurt by income inequality, rising health care
costs, skyrocketing tuition, and declining levels of public service.
These people distinctly do not work on Wall Street; they work
at McDonald's and Tractor Supply, at small manufacturing firms and as
unpaid interns, as adjuncts and delivery drivers and inventory
stockers at Sam's. These are people who maybe once were middle class,
and the Tea Party has a big head start in winning them over by making
liberals look like dirty hippies and uncaring elites. These people
may vote against their own interests, but they vote for people who
are “like them,” at least in the sense of projecting a sensible,
hard-working image. The fact that most prominent Tea Party
politicians have never actually had real jobs and are mainly career
politicians is, again, immaterial; they are not people who outwardly
look like they don't work at all.

The Tea Partiers and
those who fund them are not wise, but they are clever, and they know
how the government they purport to hate really works. It's high time
those who supported Occupy start boning up on basic civics. A
distaste for retail politics will simply guarantee Tea Party control
from now on.